Alex North

Biography

Alex North (born Isadore Soifer; Chester, Pennsylvania, 1910 – Los Angeles, California, 1991) was an American composer of film scores whose work defined much of the sound of Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s. He also wrote for the stage and for television, and his career bridged classic studio scoring and a more modern, concert-influenced idiom.

He studied at the Juilliard School in New York and later took composition courses in Moscow between 1933 and 1935. Before entering film he worked as rehearsal pianist and composer for the choreographer Anna Sokolow. During the Second World War he served in the Army, writing music for documentaries. He composed for Broadway, including the score for the original production of Death of a Salesman. It was director Elia Kazan who brought him to Hollywood, where he made his film debut with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), one of the first film scores based on jazz.

His style blended the thematic tradition of film music with dissonance and complex rhythms drawn from concert music, while keeping a lyrical melodic line. He worked often with the composer and orchestrator Henry Brant. His best-known scores include Viva Zapata!, Spartacus, Cleopatra, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Under the Volcano. His music for 2001: A Space Odyssey was discarded by Stanley Kubrick late in production, and it stayed unheard until Jerry Goldsmith re-recorded it in 1993.

After his split from Kazan, North spent several years unable to work in Hollywood because of suspected communist affiliations. His career later recovered. He received fifteen Academy Award nominations, fourteen for score and one for a song, without winning any of them. In 1986 he was given an Honorary Academy Award, the first ever granted to a composer. His music endures largely through Unchained Melody, one of the most recorded songs of the twentieth century. He died in Los Angeles in 1991 at the age of 80.

Key films

• A Streetcar Named Desire (1951): one of the first jazz-based film scores, and his most celebrated work.
• Viva Zapata! (1952): a score for Elia Kazan's portrait of Emiliano Zapata.
• Spartacus (1960): Stanley Kubrick's epic, scored in a grand, monumental style.
• Cleopatra (1963): Joseph L. Mankiewicz's superproduction, one of his Oscar-nominated scores.
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966): Mike Nichols's drama, with a harsh and restrained score.